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Interest in CS as a Major Drops
Dasein writes "The Computer Research Association says that the popularity of CS as a major among freshman has dropped in the last four years. Why is obvious to anybody working in the field. They conclude by saying 'With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level.'"
The University of Guelph (Southern Ontario, Canada) normally has 200 students entering its Bachelor of Computing (honors) program every year. This year the entrance class had 66 students. My own program at Guelph-Humber (degree/diploma in computing/telecom) has a nominal class size of 60, but we've not had a full class in the 3 years we've been running. According to my prof, the only University in Canada whose compsci department hasn't suffered is Waterloo's.
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No, it's true everywhere, including here. There's a perception among freshmen even at Brown that when we get out it'll be quite hard to find well-paying work.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
TFSummary says that a drop in CS students will lead to a shortage of IT workers. Most CS students I know do not want to do IT. They want to code, either academically or commercially, but they do not want to do IT. IT is for IT majors (or Cisco/A+/MCSE certs), not for Computer Scientists
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You simply can't take statistics from one university and assume that they're not indicative of a universal trend either. I teach computer engineering at a major public university in the midwestern US, and we are seeing trends exactly like UCLA. If you follow the link in TFA to the Taulbee survey, which encompasses all of North America, you'll see that the data there is consistent with UCLA's findings.
I think many of you are forgetting that students are slowly moving towards a Software Engineering curriculum:
:)
MIT EE&CS students
385 in 2002
240 in 2003
200 in 2004
Rutgers
CS Dept enrollment thousands less than peak of 6,500
CMU CS Dept.
3,200 applicants in 2001
2,000 applicants in 2004
U CA at Berkley CS Majors
240 in Spring 2003
226 in Spring 2004
Stanford CS undergrad majors
171 in 2000-2001
118 in 2003-2004
The demand for Computer Science majors is decreasing, while the demand for Software Engineers is increasing (US Bureau of Labor Statistics says Software Engineering jobs will be among the 10 fastest growing occupations through 2012)
Software development is changing; embrace the changes
-Rochester Institute of Technology Software Engineering major
Pure CS is dropping at MIT too, and believe me, it's not because of "easier majors in the liberal arts, social sciences or business school" are on the rise.
You might want to rethink that. I have three female friends who all have either an MA or MS in math, and they all started out teaching high school. They all left the field; two now teach community college and one has transitioned to nerd-dom. Despite what you may have heard, even math teachers get laid off. Additionally, the pay sucks, and you just haven't lived till you work in a public school in the city where one of your students is prone to setting fire to a trash can every other week (seriously).
On the other hand, here in the state of Ohio they are actually projecting a shortfall of IT folks in the next eight years.
If you can find a link for your article maybe we can figure this out.
Fortunately it's not, and the previous poster didn't suggest that it was. It's logically incorrect to jump from "programming exists" to "programming is all that exists".
I agree with you whole-heartedly!
I have many years of IT experience and recently finished an MBA. I really like operations management, but it's a real stretch to take my IT experience and make it look like operations.
I finally took a major pay cut (now just $17/hour) to work temp at a great company. While I have a great theoretical basis to undertand things from, I have tons to learn and really didn't know squat about how things really work in the industry.
My first few months have been pretty un-exciting with lots of manually looking up data and making reports. But, I've learned a lot and asked tons of questions. I'm now being trained to do the monthly "buy", which is vital - the things we sell have to be bought from the factories that make them, and there are lots of constraints involved in order to keep us profitable. My manager and his boss are pushing really hard to get head-count increased so they can hire me as a permanent ops-analyst.
So no matter what your degree is, you don't know squat about how things work in a company and in the "real world". Find a good company and go in there. Be willing to do whatever crap they have for you, and learn as much as you can while doing it. If you're worth anything and you've picked a good company, they'll see your value and find a way to use you to your fullest potential.
Some schools are doing just that. I know that my own school works hand-in-hand with industry to develop projects so that they get free labor, and we get real world experience. That is just inside the classroom. The number of outside-the-classroom research projects being cooperatively done with industry and/or government is amazing.
And these aren't just programmers-for-hire projects, either. So far we have done an assessment of the compliance of a financial institution with federal regulations, a information system security engineering project where we designed a incident aggregation system, some digital forensics projects, and more.
I am also curious why you seem to lower internships as not having real, tangible consequences. On a long-term internship I had in my undergraduate work, I was placed in an engineering department and had to develop projects that went to production. In fact, I had to redesign products, design new products, acquire the parts, schedule time for assembly, call the machinists to get things in order, set up testing procedures for these projects, and decide if the final product was ready for shipping to real customers in which real money was exchanged. When things went wrong, I was called in to face the CEO and explain what happened, where we were, and how the problem was going to be fixed.
I never made anyone a cup of coffee, nor got the luxury of sitting there watching someone else do work while I played with equations. I was in the engineering department and was expected to be able to step up to the plate as the engineering staff was already short as it was. It is my hopes that most of the hiring individuals realize that not all internships are fluffy.
I think some of the "geniuses" might very well be in that pile of resumes that you go through. Hopefully, they are smart enough to be able to differentiate their real, tangible experience from the fluffy internships people assume when they see "intern."
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
I don't understand. You keep talking about majoring in CS, but then working in the IT field. Those two things have very little to do with each other, so why do you mention them in the same breath?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You find CS to be one of the HARDEST fields? I find that claim dubious. On what grounds do you make that judgment? As someone who did his undergrad and Master's in CS and who is switching to math for his Ph.D., I'd say that I consider CS to be a relatively easy field in comparison to many of the others (math, engineering, physical sciences, etc).
I'd say that I consider CS to be a relatively easy field in comparison to many of the others (math, engineering, physical sciences, etc).
Most students don't take these as majors either. True, CS is easy compared to the pure sciences and math, IMHO. But compare it to the crap most college students really take: medical, communications and business students are everywhere. Those of us in the tech/science field are fairly few in the overall scheme of things.
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